Lisbeth Salander: The Movies Have Never Had a Heroine Quite Like Her

In the Swedish version of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” made in 2009, thugs attack Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in the Stockholm subway. She gets knocked down and bloodied, but she hits back, screaming, and chases them off with a broken bottle. In the American version of the same scene, a thief grabs her computer case and runs up an escalator. Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) overtakes him, clobbers him, reclaims the computer, slides down the wide aluminum divider between the up and down escalators, slips off the bottom and runs into a train just before its doors close. Either way, this is a very tough girl.

Let’s leave aside what the two directors (Niels Arden Oplev and David Fincher, respectively) have done, and also the variants in screenwriting, staging, and tempo, and think about the character and then the actresses. Rapace and Mara move in slightly different ways; they have different eyes, a different emotional tone. Yet Lisbeth Salander, however she’s played, has certain irreducible qualities and an irreducible force. In both cases, she’s a genius-hacker for whom no bank account or hard disk is sealed; she’s the skinny shadow who can slip in and out of houses, the head-facing-into-the-wind motorcyclist surging up and down Sweden’s icy highways. Whatever Lisbeth does, she acts without hesitation, swiftly and definitively.

As a figure, she’s derived from seventies punk and its descendants—we’ve seen the hostile stare, the black-on-black, the eye-liner before—but the movies have never had a popular heroine quite like this. Lisbeth inspires sexual rage in men. She is both a victim and an avenger, a woman damaged, abused, yet defiantly sexual—a woman prepared to hit back and to stay out in the danger zone, unwilling to change, ready for more.

In our first glance at Lisbeth, as she faces the business world, she seems closed off, seething in a hopelessly alienated way. She won’t look at anyone directly; her voice is toneless. She rattles off information but yields nothing of herself. Whatever else she is, she’s always a pro, superb at spying, penetrating, sifting, matching, collating. At the computer, her hands and mind operate at close to digital speed. The rest of her life is something else. The Goth regalia—black leather jacket and boots, tufted hair, spiked collar, piercings, an armory of rings—gives hints of dirty pleasures, harsh sexual combat, a readiness for pain. She’s already been through hell, pushed around a lot, and vulnerable (though no one could say innocent). With another push, or a period of weakness, she could slip into alcoholism or addiction; she could become a prostitute and then a corpse. Surely she’s close to being crazy, pathological. Or so it seems, at first.

But actually, Lisbeth Salander is not crazy at all. The strongest part of her sanity—and the other reason, apart from her skill, that she’s a heroine—is perfectly clear: She refuses to be a victim. When she’s brutally raped by her swinish State Guardian, she doesn’t go to the law. She has been mauled but not violated, not inside. Her integrity remains intact, which, for her, means, from the first, that she’s ready for vengeance. The desire for revenge may be dangerous and self-destructive, but it’s hardly crazy, and, in Lisbeth’s case, it has a long personal history behind it. She knows all the ways women can be brutalized by men. She joins up with the disgraced investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist when he tells her that he’s looking into long-ago atrocities committed against women. Working with Blomkvist, she becomes not only an avenger but a kind of left-feminist action figure, striking at the nexus of male and corporate power. You might say she’s an anti-fascist in vaguely fascist regalia, a walking contradiction, which is why people constantly misread her, and undervalue her.

Everything that happens to Lisbeth is a real enough danger in the world—it has happened to many women. She’s a genuine possibility, not a cartoon, and therefore far more serious as a pop-culture figure than the super-killers played by Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” movies or by pouting, vogueing Angelina Jolie in her kick-groin roles. Those characters have nearly supernatural physical powers. While Lisbeth is smart, fast, and relentless, her powers are just a slight stretching of the possible. And, dealing with the world as it is, she accepts the bargain demanded by her history and temperament—that she will risk punishment as the price of insolence and always claim the freedom to retaliate. Despite every imaginable difference, she is a legitimate successor to such male icons as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. The exercise of righteous violence is what turns action figures into pop-culture icons. That, plus an aura of outlaw style and perversity. You can admire Dirty Harry or Lisbeth Salander without feeling like a prig. They’re both a little odd.

As a woman in a movie, Lisbeth fascinates us in part because we want to see how much she will respond to normal human demands. If Blomkvist admires her, needs her, will she show some personal interest in return, some warmth? In the Swedish version, Noomi Rapace is almost a completely stylized figure, angular and abrupt, with a long, slightly-pointed jaw and a glare that hardly ever softens. She wears eye-liner a lot; her eyes surge out of her face like pincers. At times, she lowers her head and cocks her neck. There’s something machine-like about her intensity, which is modified only by a puckered mouth, a lower lip that recedes slightly when she’s momentarily baffled by something at the computer.

Speaking in her own tongue gives Rapace a natural advantage. Rooney Mara speaks English with a put-on Swedish accent. She doesn’t fumble her lines, but you can feel her willing herself through the part, struggling to stay clipped and flat-toned. In a few minor ways, the conception of Lisbeth has been softened for American audiences. Mara’s eyes, mostly unlined and isolated in her face, which has been chalked into a pale mask, express need as well as anger. Despite the spectacular athleticism of the subway scene—a single, continuous line of action—her physical presence is more approachable, more womanly (in the conventional sense) than Rapace’s. She’s more of a figure to feel for, even identify with, but not quite as much fun to watch. When her Lisbeth has sex with Blomkvist, the connection moves a little closer to a regular love affair. It’s true that Mara straddles Daniel Craig and drives toward her orgasm like a teenage boy, but, afterward, she looks at him with something like tenderness. There’s a hint of something more, something that may be developed as the series goes on (if it goes on), something like an open admission of need, something like a bond.

Illustration by Luis Grañena

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.